Medieval Lives

Rating:
Summary: Medieval events in modern words
Review: When I sat down to read Medieval Lives: Eight Charismatic Men and Women of the Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor, I fully expected to be treated to a pleasant evening's review of eight famous medieval lives ranging from the fifth to the fifteenth century, but instead, I was confronted by a conversation in modern language with Eleanor of Aquitaine.

"'I am very tired,' said Queen Eleanor to her courtiers lounging on the grass outside of her palace in Poitiers in France on a warm September day in the year 1169, 'of this interminable, nasty quarrel between my husband King Henry and Archbishop Thomas Becket. All this fuss over a handful of murderous and thieving priests. I once saw the king become so angry with the archbishop and his extreme demands upon the Crown that Henry took off all his clothes in public and began chewing straw.'"

Needless to say, this is not the usual introduction to Eleanor. You see, he's even caught me in his little trap. Here I am calling historical figures by their first names, getting downright familiar with the great queen herself. I'm not sure I like it. I'm sure she wouldn't like it. What can it mean to the history of history as we know it? Does this mean that the next Nixon biography will portray old Richard practicing in the Oval Office shaving mirror? "'I'm not a crook.' Not quite sincere enough. Yes, emphasize 'not' more. That's better. 'I'm not a crook!' No, no too bold. More contrite. 'I'm not a crook.' There, that's what I really mean." Is this what history is to be now?

I can't seem to shake that old-fashioned notion that writing history is like building a castle stone by stone. The historian goes out in the field and he dusts off a nice fact. It's hard, reliable, verifiable and the experts more or less agree that it is indeed a stone. He carries it back to his castle site and shapes the thing to do his bidding, and he places it in with lots of other equally well grounded stones and thus materializes a castle by his effort. Cantor seems to be trying to build a castle with the spaces between the stones. There are no footnotes, and only a very few books mentioned in the bibliography.

Historians call Kantor's technique thick narrative, but it seems rather thin to me. Dr. Richard Kaeuper, Medievalist at the University of Rochester, explained to me that the thick narrative technique is intended to restore the position of individual actors in the narration of historical events. It provides immediacy and contingency, by which he means that thick narrative makes us aware that historical figures had open options. They effected history by their choices and were not merely the playthings of massive historical forces.

Reading Kantor's Medieval Lives, I feel like someone who has just encountered a new language or a radio with pictures. I'm torn by this "up close and personal" account of historical figures. I like historical figures when they're good and dead. This breathing life back into them is faintly ghostly, scary, vaguely Stephen King.

C.S. Lewis wrote both history and fiction. He managed both genres without tripping over his fences. He flew off into flights of unbelievable fantasy in books like The Screwtape Letters (1942), and his science fiction trilogy that started in 1938 with Out of the Silent Planet, while interlarding these amazing acts of acrobatics with his soberingly balanced description of courtly love in The Allegory of Love (1936) and his solidly grounded explication of Milton in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). If C. S. Lewis figured out how to keep his fiction and his non-fiction in different corrals, why shouldn't Cantor be required to do the same?

I'm starting to get uncomfortable when history and story-telling merge. I'm afraid that in less skillful hands this technique could easily degenerate into the worst brand of sloppy history ever concocted. Yet, in Cantor's hands it works pretty well. I'm hypnotized by his account of a conversation between Humbert of Lorraine and Abbot Hugh of Cluny as they discuss the problems of eleventh century Rome and of the church. No amount of dry history could enliven it as easily, and efficiently, especially since I would never sit through the required amount of medieval history to come to this understanding otherwise. Are we supposed to give up the joys of this sort of performance just because this methodology might later be distorted by lesser lights? Are there to be no Mozart's encouraged in this egalitarian world because their brilliance casts a pall over the old age of us Salieris?

I keep thinking I prefer my history straight, but how come I can't shake this impression that Norman F. Cantor's Medieval Lives has liberated me somehow?


Rating:
Summary: Medieval Lives was a complete dissapointment.
Review: In the words of the author, "I cannot recreate you, medieval people, because I could not definehow your personalitiesand desires linked with concrete times and places. You were stick figures, totems on a landscape, lines upon the horizon, temporally and spatially floating away."
I couldn't say it better myself. The author could not, in fact, recreate anything like the lives of the people featured in the book. He drew, at best, very modern people who spouted codified, modernized rhetoric based, very loosely, on philosophy that took its root in the Middle Ages. Virtually no attempt was made to make any of these people sound like people from the Middle Ages. Most of the time, it seemed as though the characters were simply talking heads that served no purpose other than espoousing the author's personal agenda. They spoke in a kind of sociological dissertation language that would not have been found in any setting outside of modern universities.
Save your money!

Rating:
Summary: Medieval Lives deserves at most one star
Review: In the words of the author, "I cannot recreate you, medieval people, because I could not definehow your personalitiesand desires linked with concrete times and places. You were stick figures, totems on a landscape, lines upon the horizon, temporally and spatially floating away."
I couldn't say it better myself. The author could not, in fact, recreate anything like the lives of the people featured in the book. He drew, at best, very modern people who spouted codified, modernized rhetoric based, very loosely, on philosophy that took its root in the Middle Ages. Virtually no attempt was made to make any of these people sound like people from the Middle Ages. Most of the time, it seemed as though the characters were simply talking heads that served no purpose other than espoousing the author's personal agenda. They spoke in a kind of sociological dissertation language that would not have been found in any setting outside of modern universities.
Save your money!

Rating:
Summary: Anachronistic
Review: Medieval history is a fascinating subject in the right hands. The "eight charismatic men and women of the middle ages" that Professor Cantor includes in these vignettes are all worthy of study. They were movers and shakers in their eras, and are good representatives of their times. Cantor begins in the 4th century with a chapter on the Emperor Constantine's mother, Helena Augusta. Two other medieval women, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Hildegarde of Bingen, figure in later chapters. The book is divided into nine chapters, taking us from the 4th to the 15th centuries.

The last chapter features a kind of round-table discussion at a French castle (this is after Henry V has defeated the French at Agincourt) between John, Duke of Bedford (Henry V's brother), Cardinal Beaufort, Sir Edmund Smythe ("Duke John's civil and legal administrator in France), Thomas Blount, Abraham de Mendoza (A Spanish Jewish convert to the Christian faith and a rpominent papal banker), Christine de Pisan (Parisian poet, critic and book publisher), Brother William Marsh (Duke John's confessor), "Irishman" Dennis Hennessey and Mathilde of Hainault ("abbess of St. Mary of Rouen"). This chapter also sums up what is weakest and even amateurish about this book. Instead of engaging in any sort of free-flowing, naturally occuring diologue, these figures are mereley thrown together by the author to spout staged-sounding, wooden exposition. As literary characters, they are totally artificial, contrived mouthpieces whose sole function is to relate historical information the author wants to get across. Often, the information Professor Cantor conveys is misinformation anyway, as evidenced by the following passage, in which Christine de Pisan describes the current conditions in Venice: "I do not know from personal experience what they think in the Adriatic now, but if I know the Venetians, they will not let the Florentines get ahead of them, and will give their own twist to the idea of the Renaissance. Being closer to the Byzantine Empire, they will, I expect, stress Greek as well as Latin antiquity, and in view of the parlous condition of Constantinople, hard pressed continually by the Turks, I would surmise that the Venetians would pursuade Greek scholars to relocate from Byzantium and set up schools in Venice. But as to the issue so heatedly debated here, I agree with Mendoza that a new cultural era has dawned. For better or worse, I think the Middle Ages are waning."

What is wrong with this picture? Aside from the fact that the diologue is clumsily constructed and completely artificial, the fact that a professor of "history, sociology and comparative literature" at NYU would have one of his characters say, in the middle of the 15th century that "the Middle Ages are waning" is sad indeed. The most common, rudimentary logic would dictate that a person living in what we term "the Middle Ages" wouldn't consider them the "Middle Ages." They would consider themselves to be living in the "Modern Age," if anything. But in fact they didn't tend to think in terms anywhere near these in the first place. The same is to a lesser degree true of the term "Renaissance." That capitalized expression didn't have any currency until Walter Pater's 19th century essays on Italian Art. These are just among the most glaring of the myriad inaccuracies strewn across the pages of Medieval Lives. There is so much good literature on medieval history out there that one could turn to practically any work and come up with something superior to this . One can't go wrong turning to the primary texts either. Read Froissart, St. Augustine, Procopius, Joineville, or the Venerable Bede. Pass this one by.

Rating:
Summary: Medieval Lives deserves at most one star
Review: medieval lives is quite possibly the worst historical book that I have ever read. In this book, it is hard to connect with the characters and thus makes it less interesting. In addition, the historiacl backround for each chapter is so complex and written as if he was trying to confuse you that it is almost impossible to ever fully grasp what he attempting to say. I had to write a paper on two chapters from this book and I got nothing out of it. If you need a nice book to make you go to sleep, this is the one!

Rating:
Summary: Modern Lives
Review: Medieval Lives was a complete dissapointment.

In the words of the author, "I cannot recreate you, medieval people, because I could not define how your personalitiesand desires linked with concrete times and places. You were stick figures, totems on a landscape, lines upon the horizon, temporally and spatially floating away."
I couldn't say it better myself. The author could not, in fact, recreate anything like the lives of the people featured in the book. He drew, at best, very modern people who spouted codified, modernized rhetoric based, very loosely, on philosophy that took its root in the Middle Ages. Virtually no attempt was made to make any of these people sound like people from the Middle Ages. Most of the time, it seemed as though the characters were simply talking heads that served no purpose other than espoousing the author's personal agenda. They spoke in a kind of sociological dissertation language that would not have been found in any setting outside of modern universities.
Save your money!

Rating:
Summary: Modern Lives
Review: Medieval Lives was a complete dissapointment.

In the words of the author, "I cannot recreate you, medieval people, because I could not define how your personalitiesand desires linked with concrete times and places. You were stick figures, totems on a landscape, lines upon the horizon, temporally and spatially floating away."
I couldn't say it better myself. The author could not, in fact, recreate anything like the lives of the people featured in the book. He drew, at best, very modern people who spouted codified, modernized rhetoric based, very loosely, on philosophy that took its root in the Middle Ages. Virtually no attempt was made to make any of these people sound like people from the Middle Ages. Most of the time, it seemed as though the characters were simply talking heads that served no purpose other than espoousing the author's personal agenda. They spoke in a kind of sociological dissertation language that would not have been found in any setting outside of modern universities.
Save your money!

Rating:
Summary: Deep Thought
Review: This is an amazing way of having this period come alive. A great book for people interested in religion, humanism, or just this time period. It's a great read.